I think most people by now have heard about the complaints being registered about how it seems like every Microsoft blogger is talking about Whidbey, Longhorn, or other future technologies. I'm certainly guilty of this at times. There's no question about that. So, with that in mind, I wanted to write about five of my favorite technologies available today that work with .Net.

1. VSIP SDK - The Visual Studio Industry Partner SDK lets you develop add-ins for Visual Studio to extend its functionality.
2. ASP.Net Web Matrix - A free tool that supports WYSIWYG ASP.Net development.
3. Rotor - A significant portion of the .Net toolset; this includes the CLI (the ECMA standard version of the .Net runtime, a C# compiler, a J# compiler, and significant portion of the .Net Framework). Rotor runs on FreeBSD, Mac OS X, and Windows. There are patches available to let it run on Panther, too.
4. Amazon.com Web Services - Build data driven apps powered by Amazon.com's data stores.
5. .Text - A free, powerful blogging engine for IIS, written on .Net.